Under the Radar Review: Basquiat as Seen Through the Eyes of a Friend in In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat would have been 65 last month. It’s a mind-blowing thought when you think about the impact he had on the art world and on American culture in his 27 years. We’ll never know what he would have gone on to do, but there are those who have firsthand knowledge of the things he did.

One of them is actor Roger Guenveur Smith, who met Basquiat during the ’80s while rapping as “Hollywatts” and became close with him during Basquiat’s stint on the West Coast. Smith has brought together memories of his friend in In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a mesmerizing hourlong performance that combines storytelling with an uncanny summoning of Basquiat into the intimate darkness of the Fourth Street Theatre.

At the beginning, a projection of Basquiat’s iconic crown shines stage-right while Eartha Kitt’s version of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” is juxtaposed with a near-inaudible recording of a reading from the medical text of Gray’s Anatomy, a book that fascinated Basquiat since childhood. Smith’s longtime collaborator Marc Anthony Thompson, who created the provocative blend of music and voice, improvises the show’s intro with new material nightly. It’s the audial equivalent of Basquiat crossing out a word to draw attention to it.

Then Smith steps out of the shadows (spectral lighting by Arlo Sanders) in Basquiat style—barefoot in a suit—and tells us about his own father, an elevator operator, who challenged his son to be a Black man in America and to “be the best actor you can be.” We quickly realize that this will be no formal monologue about the life of Basquiat but rather a spoken-word meditation on the experiences of two artists whose heady days of youth intertwined for a time.

Speaking with the wide-eyed intensity of an oracle, Smith does tell us about big moments from Basquiat’s life: the car accident that left him without a spleen at age 7, his teen years tagging as SAMO in New York, the painting of a skull that fetched $110.5 million at auction (at the time, the highest price ever paid for a work by an American artist).

But he also includes stories you may not have read in biographies, like the time he witnessed Basquiat wrest a coat with a Confederate flag off a clubgoer and stomp it on the floor, or the way Smith based the arsonist-artist Smiley, from the Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing, on Basquiat. They sensed a fire in each other. “Hey, Hollywatts,” said Baquiat when the two first met, “I really like your energy. You wanna go to a movie?” They saw The King of Comedy.

Basquiat was the real king of comedy, Smith says, something that gets obscured by shadows of drug addiction and famous collaborators like Andy Warhol. None of that gets much mention here. But in this telling, we do sense a vulnerability, a need for approval, in both Basquiat and Smith, two great artists who faced down America while raising themselves up. Neither really needs our approval, but they’ve got it anyway.